Archive for June, 2010

The popular myth of the coming of the sound cinema is that The Jazz Singer was the decisive film. It may have been an important moment, but if you read The Speed of Sound by Scott Eyman you will see that the story is more nuanced. Today we have a candidate for the 3-D Jazz Singer: Avatar.(more…)

In 1980 or thereabouts, a change occurred to computer graphics technology. It was an important one for me personally and for my company StereoGraphics because it allowed us to create stereoscopic displays based on raster graphics so useful for industry and science. Prior to that time high-end applications for computers outputted images that looked like wire frames or line drawings. These were variously known as calligraphic, stroke or vector displays. I remember playing an arcade game in 1981. It was called “Tank Command,” and cast and crew on the set of Rottweiler Dogs of Hell at EO Studios in Shelby South Carolina got quite involved with it. Between takes we played “Tank Command,” with its eerie green lines against a stygian background. The farther away the object was, the dimmer were the lines – that was how depth was conveyed – that and perspective and relative size. These displays had an electron beam that was steered to write lines on the inside of a green phosphored cathode ray tube and it built up an image that perceptually added up to one that didn’t flicker and appeared to be integral even though portions of it were written at different times. (more…)